Miracle Merchant review - A solo card game of potions and commerce

Miracle Merchant is the third in a trilogy of tangentially linked card games from Tiny Touch Tales.

Where Card Crawl was a straight up dungeon adventure, and Card Thief threw some stealth elements into the mix, Miracle Merchant takes things in a different direction.

Here you're laying down cards to mix potions for a series of adventurers. Clear the whole deck and you finish the game. Fail to mix a potion correctly, and not only will you kill your customer, you'll get kicked back to the start.

Mix your drinks

Each customer that comes in tells you what sort of potion they want. You need to make them something which features that ingredient, otherwise you'll fail. But you also need to make sure the potion is powerful enough.

Your mixes lose power because some bonehead has left a bunch of evil ingredients in your stack. You need to use these to get rid of them, and there are some masochists out there who come to you looking for potions where they're the main ingredient.

Customers also have a secondary ingredient, which is their favourite. Add some of that into the mix and they'll give you a bonus. Complete a game and your score is totted up. Then you'll probably jump in and start again.

There's more of a feel of a solitaire card game here than with the other games. You're just battling against the deck, trying to ensure that your customers leave satisfied. Or at the very least not with the flesh stripped from their bones.

It's a neat system, and there's a level of depth here too. Different cards can buff and boost others if you play them at the right time.

You need to keep your decks clear too. You can see what the next customer wants, so planning ahead is important.

You can also kick customers to the back of the line if the ingredients you need to use are blocked out by those evil black cards.

Getting carded

All in all, this is an intriguing addition to the series. It's fun, strategic, and just random enough to keep you coming back for more.

Miracle Merchant looks gorgeous too, and it cements Tiny Touch Tales as one of the most interesting developers working in digital cards at the moment.